“I can tell you categorically there is no plan of the Israelis to displace people out of Gaza against their will,” Huckabee told reporters while visiting Palestinian-Americans in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir outlined a plan on Thursday that aims to see 250,000 Palestinians leave Gaza in the first year, followed by the departure of the remaining roughly two million residents over the next six years.
The proposal came a day after Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel was prepared to remove Palestinians from Gaza by sea and land but was waiting for the United States, which he said was discussing where the population would go.
Katz, without citing his source, claimed that 80 percent of people in Gaza wanted to leave but that Hamas was preventing them from doing so.
Huckabee said President Donald Trump’s administration, which has made hostility to international migration a central priority, wanted Palestinians to have the option to leave by choice.
“There is an open-mindedness if people wish to leave, that they should have the right to leave,” Huckabee said, describing it as a “disgrace” to “incarcerate” Palestinians inside Gaza.
“Nobody is suggesting there would be forced displacement -- the Israelis are not, the Americans are not. I know of no one who supports that,” he said.
Forced displacement of a civilian population from occupied territory is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Virtually the entire population of Gaza has already been displaced internally by Israel’s military offensive following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Since the war began, some far-right Israeli politicians have spoken of bringing settlers back to the Gaza Strip, where Israel dismantled settlements in 2005 as part of a unilateral plan to disengage from the densely populated region.
The latest remarks on displacement come ahead of the October 27 elections, with polls showing a tight race for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has brought previously shunned far-right figures into his cabinet.
US President Donald Trump stunned the world early in his second term by proposing to displace all Palestinians, at least temporarily, from Gaza and transform the rubble-strewn Mediterranean territory into a luxury resort.
He later backtracked following pushback from countries including Egypt, the only country other than Israel to border Gaza.
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